


Of All the Strangers,

by Seebright



Category: Hyper Light Drifter
Genre: AU, Almost Fairytale-y, Angst, Body Horror, But Not Particularly Gruesome, Developing Relationship, Drifter The Cryptid, Everyone Disliked That :(, From The Perspective Of The Central Town At Large, Gen, Hopeful Ending, If Guardian Hadn't Vouched For Them AU, Just Not For Our Favorite Drifter(s), Mistrust, Mostly Because Of Nitpicky Mechanics Details, Mute Drifter, NG+ Drifter, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Pronouns, Off-Screen Major Character Death, Other, Spoilers, THAT TALL CHILD LOOKS TERRIBLE, That's Right I Guess, They Just Rolled Up, They Were Not Having A Good Time, because let's face it, i guess, it's the, more like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22251283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seebright/pseuds/Seebright
Summary: The black-cloaked drifter stumbled into town recently. Their presence was felt like a hushed silence, like a morgue. The Guardian didn’t bring them. They brought themself, pulled their weak legs to carry them on like the stilts of a marionette.
Relationships: The Drifter & The Guardian (Hyper Light Drifter), The Drifter/The Guardian (Hyper Light Drifter), Townsfolk & The Guardian (Hyper Light Drifter)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 52





	Of All the Strangers,

**Author's Note:**

> you're the strangest that I've seen.

The black-cloaked drifter stumbled into town recently. Their presence was felt like a hushed silence, like a morgue. The Guardian didn’t bring them. They brought themself, pulled their weak legs to carry them on like the stilts of a marionette. 

They had all the presence of one. Their eyes were dark, yes, but there was somehow less to them. Darker than the Swordmaster’s, for all they were the same shuttered black. They walked like they walked to their death. 

Not like one would walk to the gallows, or to a gunfight. The Drifter walked as though the fight had already been lost, as though their neck was already wrung, every step the last tilting lurches of the dying, the dead whose mind hadn’t quite caught up, hadn’t yet realized they couldn’t go on. 

Their eyes were hollow and beneath them were sickly purple smudges. They often slept, or at least they were often holed up in the Guardian’s house for days where no one saw them, and the Guardian didn’t go back there. But the bruises never lightened to match the wan blue of their sallow cheeks. 

They were never seen eating. No one saw them sleep, once the Guardian threw themself with intensity into their own unknown search. Whenever they made their unsure way past the apothecary, for all that the paths they walked were unwavering and brooked no curiosity, the Healer would watch and seem to be trying with furrowed brow to comprehend something, to make two facts meet into a satisfying conclusion, and they would always fail, eyes darting to the Drifter and down and back again like they couldn’t possibly be there walking past the shop under their own power.

And then, after perhaps a week, they disappeared. 

Word was they’d been seen stumbling into the East. For all that their legs never seemed quite strong enough to support them, they were last spotted dashing over a crevasse and appearing for all the world as though they intended to keep going. 

Good riddance, many said, though uncomfortably. It didn’t feel like an end.

It wasn’t. Weeks later, word of the massacre had filtered back through the town and rumors had had plenty of time to spread. It was them, the town whispered. They brought the killing. 

It didn’t seem important that the Drifter had been scarcely capable of swinging their sword or walking a straight line when they’d left, or that when the wind caught their cloak the dent of their abdomen could be seen clear as day, or that they’d coughed up blood so often and so much that, though it never seemed to stay for more than a few minutes, they occasionally fainted dead away on the street. They didn’t die.

And they hadn’t. After those weeks, the Drifter staggered back out of the wooded path, clutching their chest and their sword and standing unaided. For all the dangers of the East nowadays, all the slaughtered travelers that hadn’t come home, and every worried warning the Guardian had given them all when they came home covered in orange and pink blood, the Drifter hadn’t died. 

They did not look improved. Their eyes still hung hollow in their face, their fragile frame still shook, and now they bowed their head, face unreadable, when they passed an otter-folk walking the streets, but they seemed no further past death’s door than before. However much the intervening time had dulled the town’s collective memory and made this returned, dying wraith all the starker, they still walked unwavering, inevitable.

This time they only stayed two days, locked in the Guardian’s house. Guardian had been gone several days themself, and when they came back to their house occupied, they simply resupplied their pack and left again to the North without stopping by. 

The Drifter collected no supplies when they left the same way. Only their thick cloaks drawn tightly around them and their weapons at their belt. Many wondered how they expected to climb the steep and at times interrupted steps to the summit, especially what with the death-cult taking root, but no one truly thought that would be what stopped them. 

Guardian and Drifter were gone for only a week this time. Though the town was on tenterhooks, both concerned for the Guardian’s safe return and dreading the Drifter’s, no news had come down the mountain. If the bird-folk’s situation had changed, no one knew about it.

They returned together; the Guardian half-carrying the frail drifter as they coughed up gallons of blood over their front. The cult leader was dead, the Guardian relayed, though little remained of the bird-folk up North. They glanced down at the drifter they held more or less upright, though the Drifter’s dull eyes were half-closed and to all appearance dead to the world. They might have really been dead this time, save for the continuously trickling blood dripping from under their cowl and the gentle heaving of their shoulders.

Dead? The town wondered. How? Insurgence? Did you kill the cultist, Guardian?

No, the Guardian replied. They glanced again at the Drifter, who faintly shook their head and immediately choked on their own blood. Both the Guardian and the Drifter seemed unbothered, or at least unconcerned about this, though it seemed they might not be able to truly breathe through the sodden cowl sticking to their cheeks.

The Guardian refused to give any more detail other than to warn them away from the mountain for the time being. The cult might not have a head, but it had still come to be.

This time when the Drifter stopped in the Guardian’s home, the Guardian stayed with them. 

The next day, the Guardian went to the apothecary and bought gently spiced drinks meant to soothe coughs.

The Guardian was around now more often than not, and significantly more harried than before. For the next few days they flitted around town like they couldn’t decide what needed their attention most, doing anything that might keep them out of their home. 

Then someone caught the Guardian coughing, spotted a few drops of bright blood on their gloves, and the town was caught up in immediate, breathless panic.

For all that the Guardian tried to reassure them that what they had was perhaps the same as the Drifter’s illness, but old and non-transmissible and fine, under control, really, there was no peace. 

It took only a few hours of fearful gossip and misdirection before the community at large was entirely convinced that the Drifter was killing the Guardian, just like they’d killed the otters. Their Guardian, brave and steadfast and so dear, so loved, constant and safeguarding and always, always there when they needed them. Entirely unacceptable, entirely dangerous.

There was no clear consensus on exactly how the thin, sickly drifter whose only saving grace was that they couldn’t seem to die was actually harming the Guardian, when by the Guardian’s own testimony they’d collapsed into a dead sleep the moment they were helped to bed and hadn’t woken up since. But they were. Of course, they were, one is coincidence, but three tragedies in the span of a month? Preempted only by the Drifter’s arrival?

They had to go.

The Guardian talked them all down from bringing the death the Drifter couldn’t seem to chase down to them there and then, but then they woke the Drifter and helped them out of town. 

Despite the Guardian’s fervent refusal and then calculated argument and then quiet pleading, the Drifter refused to go any way but West.

The Guardian was quiet when they returned alone, stopping only to collect enough supplies for two for a week at least before following the Drifter into the crystalline forest. They couldn’t convince the Guardian to stay, to let the unknown, dangerous, inscrutable drifter find their own way to whatever terrible end they sought, though many of them begged.

The Guardian narrowed their eyes reassuringly at them, like they were smiling grimly behind their helmet, shouldered their pack, and followed the Drifter.

It was almost a month before anyone saw either of them again.

The Drifter, almost as expected, came back exactly the same as before, though with a few new tears in their cloaks and a new gun no one recognized weighting their belt, one they could scarcely carry for all it wasn’t a larger model. They arrived in the dead of night when no one was brave enough to turn them away, marched up to the Guardian’s house, and locked the door behind them. 

The Guardian returned the next morning. They were haggard and worn and the bulk they’d always carried with the ease and confidence of one who knew their strength seemed diminished. They were thinner in the shoulders, though perhaps that was just the careful way they held them now. The Guardian wasn’t out in daylight for more than a handful of minutes before they unlocked their door and disappeared after the Drifter, but it was enough to know that whatever illness they had become afflicted with, it was far, far worse now.

It was well known that the Guardian’s house had been, for a long time, a general drifters' sanctuary. Before the Guardian had stayed to protect them, many drifters had come and gone, sometimes two or three at once. Drifters weren’t an especially well understood lot, but it was commonly known that they kept their hideouts stocked for emergencies, and that they rarely didn’t have a plan to back up their speed and skill, outmatched only by their peculiar ability to hide themselves away.

So when the pair didn’t emerge for the turn of a week, it was assumed they were living off of that.

Not long afterwards the Guardian did leave by the weak, cold light of dawn, and though their sickness had only worsened for the rest, they had a proudness and a determination still that none had ever noticed in the slightest in the Drifter, for all that they too never gave way. They picked up some meager supplies and said goodbye to the shopkeeper, and asked that they stay safe, and then they went South.

Hours later the Drifter left the house in a shaky stumble, with more life in their eyes than anyone had seen before. With tremors wracking their entire body, hands trembling though they clutched tightly enough at their cloaks in the warmth of midday that their knuckles jutted from the backs of their gloves, they asked anyone who would listen where the Guardian had gone.

It was the first they’d spoken to anyone at all, for all that they used their bot to write out the clumsily worded panicked glyphs. 

The people they asked were taken aback, shaken from their understanding that the Drifter was all but an untouchable figure of myth and mist, a plagued creature from another land who drifted inside death’s door and did nothing that would prove they were truly a person who spoke and ate and slept and cared at all. Suddenly, it truly did seem ridiculous that they’d been accused of murdering the East’s white-furred folk, looking into their wide, dark eyes gleaming with something intense and caring so much.

Please, the Drifter continued, the writing scrawled and misspelled from the projected screen their bot produced. Their eyes were fever-bright, their stance wide like they thought they might need to dash away, or that they might otherwise fall down. 

They didn’t tell me where they went, the Drifter wrote unevenly.

The Guardian went South, one uncertain townsfolk ventured. What were you planning to do about it?

If possible, the Drifter’s sallow complexion blanched. Their eyes, who before today no one had seen hold any emotion at all, watered and brimmed with tears and they unhooked their claws from their cloak long enough to swipe a palm across them.

Alright, they wrote. Thank you. Goodbye.

And they turned and walked out of town along the southern road, and the town wondered after them if they had made a terrible and cruel mistake, and wondered then if not making it would have mattered at all.

It was a very long time before the Drifter came back. More than a month, probably closer to two. The South was a hard place to live in, for all that it rained often the sands were so desolate and poisoned that very precious little would grow. A wasteland, scattered with the whirring, biting remnants of something powerful and furious. 

But so long as one stayed above ground, the most dangerous thing about the place was the place itself. There was water, if one was canny enough to gather it from the everlasting drizzle, but aside from the lizard-folk nothing actually lived long enough to be eaten except the little mechanical creatures that scurried through the dunes, stinging at the ankles of anyone who sought a moment’s rest.

It wasn’t the sort of place one who’d never been there disappeared in for two months and survived. It wasn’t a place one with experience, supplies, and companionship could entirely expect to escape.

With the realization that the Drifter was only a drifter after all, not a frightful vision come to torment them, doubt was cast as to whether they could come back. 

And the Guardian didn’t come back, either, which was a cause for extreme concern. The creatures of the woods were starting to become bolder and accidents were an increasing occurrence.

And again, in the absence of any other information, they wondered if they’d done the right thing by telling the Drifter where the Guardian had gone. 

The Drifter returned, of course. But the Guardian didn’t. Not entirely.

No one could have guessed the Drifter had been at anything but rock bottom from the moment they stepped into town months and months ago. Physically they were all but a shell, moments and breaths from the grave, frightfully close to falling over and simply never getting back up. In spirit they hadn’t been much better off, trudging through the days like they’d really, honestly prefer death, eyes blank and heavily lidded, neck bowed, arms cinched loosely around themself under their cloaks. 

Now, it seemed the intensity that had taken them when they’d set off into the South had entirely gone and had in its place hollowed out everything left. In the forty-five seconds or less between when they turned the corner into town and when they activated the grown-over elevator no one in living memory had ever seen functional, let alone used, it was only in the last moments that it was noticed that their haggard black cloaks had been replaced with the Guardian’s. 

It sat so differently on their narrow frame, fur trim sodden with rain and fringes stained heavily with blood, a heavy burden that caved in their shoulders instead of a beacon of protection and safety, that it was only coincidence they noticed at all. 

After a time, hours on, the elevator returned empty. The ground shook and groaned like buckling metal but stayed firm. 

There was a lightness to the air. The attacks stopped. The sky seemed oddly forgiving. 

They missed the Guardian, dearly, spoke of them for years and years and laughed about their stories and exploits and cast quieter thanks into the night for the lives they’d kept from being shortened by the dangers of the world, dangers that they’d only just missed being lessened to an extent that they could live again.

A few months without a crystal wolf sighting and people began to venture West. The bird-folk were rebuilding their culture, slowly, brushing off the dusty tomes in the once heavily-guarded great library and trying to remember how to read them. The otter-folk rallied and the toad-people, without their ruler, almost willingly left the otters’ shrines and stone halls to their builders’ paws again. The sick who coughed up blood improved.

Years on, the world was not at peace, but it was a not-peace that could be fought for and built on and lived in like there hadn’t been in a very long time. Something had been crushing down on it, and in that weight’s absence there was room to grow.

The Drifter never came back.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry sorry, NG+ just hit me y'know. It felt like the grimdark AU of an already dark game. Maybe I did it wrong, but I didn't get the cutscene with Guardian at the beginning of the game and that struck me. It was sort of like the Drifter hadn't gotten that leg-up right at the beginning, and everything was worse.  
> I swear I'll write fluff next time. Title's a lyric from a song, The Stranger by Lord Huron.


End file.
